Morning Bell

the minidisc

Thom Yorke told Select it was “basically the only one” he wrote with all the words pretty much straight away. He put it on MiniDisc, the only copy. Then a lightning storm wiped the disc and he forgot the song entirely, until five months later, on a plane, awake for twenty-four hours and just dropping off, it came back to him.

It's very, very violent. Extremely violent.

thom yorke · select, december 2000

In the same breath he said the words were less dramatic than they sounded, with one exception, the line about cutting the children in half, which he allowed was dramatic whichever way it was taken.

the furniture

It reads like a house being divided, down to who keeps the furniture, and Marc Hogan at Vulture heard a divorce in it and called its view of one Solomon-like. Yorke wrote it the way he wrote much of the record, cutting phrases up and setting clichés beside banal remarks, so that an everyday question about where the car is parked sits next to the children.

two recordings

Plenty of what the band started in 1999 was dropped halfway. Yorke told Mojo he would stop the tape, call an idea rubbish and start something else, and months later they would play it back and wonder why they had stopped; he named this song as one it happened to. Part of that year was spent at Batsford Park, a country house in Gloucestershire, and Ed O'Brien's diary lists the Batsford “Morning Bell” among the first six songs Nigel Godrich mixed, that November. The Kid A take came first: David Fricke reported in Rolling Stone that it went down on the band's second day in Copenhagen, in March 1999, and that the song was good enough to cut again for Amnesiac.

The Kid A version runs in 5/4 over organ chords, bass and a steady drum pattern, with Yorke's voice only lightly treated, and Brent DiCrescenzo in Pitchfork heard Jonny Greenwood squeezing feedback out of his guitar like whale song. The last minute is where it comes apart, the guitar screeching and the effects piling up until Yorke goes under. A piece of that minute went into one of the short “blips” that stood in for videos in 2000, over a black-and-white animation of a long-armed figure walking across a snowy field.

arles, in the dark

Its first night was at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000. A thunderstorm had held the band back, and the lights failed during “Planet Telex”, the song before, so they carried on into “Morning Bell” in the dark.

It was played 40 times that year and 35 the next, its two busiest years. Later it went away for 2,622 days, until the American Airlines Arena in Miami on 30 March 2017, and the archive now has it on 160 nights, the latest in Pittsburgh on 26 July 2018.

again, on amnesiac

At the Royal Festival Hall in London on 1 July 2000, with the song still unreleased, Yorke introduced it as “a song about amnesia” and played it at the piano. Eleven months later the other take came out on Amnesiac as “Morning Bell/Amnesiac”. O'Brien said the band often recorded songs several ways and binned most of them, and this one was strong enough to bear hearing again. To Yorke it was like a recurring dream.

A live “Morning Bell” from South Park in Oxford on 7 July 2001 went onto I Might Be Wrong that November. Twenty years later Kid A Mnesia added another, “The Morning Bell (In the Dark Version)”, which lasts two minutes.